What's really behind Twitter's staff exodus

http://money.cnn.com/2011/12/19/technology/twitter_exodus/

by ssclafani • 15 years ago

41 34 15 years ago

money.cnn.com

nhangen• 15 years ago

FWIW, I hate the new design and feel like it's a major step backwards, both from a design standpoint and from a usability standpoint.

The bigger question I'd like to see answered is what's the story with the board shakeup?

gcr• 15 years ago

What's with the annoying video advertisements?

krogsgard• 15 years ago

The new web interface appears very ad driven (sidebar left, for instance). And all Twitter did with Tweetdeck / Chromedeck is destroy it. It's near unusable.

ozten• 15 years ago

Twitter has 800 employees? Just say'n...

ebiester• 15 years ago

Apparently, many are in ad sales if they're up to 2400 advertisers on a platform where you don't have to see the ads if you're on mobile.

diego• 15 years ago

"Company insiders say the old guard is being wiped out by Twitter's new leadership team. They also say that's probably a good move."

What's not said in the article is that those insiders (even those who left) must still have company stock. What else are they going to say?

The article sounds too favorable, I wouldn't be surprised if a PR agency had a hand in it.

jpdoctor• 15 years ago

> (even those who left) must still have company stock.

The ones who are no longer there should prepare for punitive dilution.

ChristianMarks• 15 years ago

Contemptible. This emphasis on "culture" is fatuous horse excrement. Whenever you hear that word, reach for your resume. It means that a cohort of smug self-satisfied untalented didactic mansplainers is about to institute a policy of competent mediocrity. I used to think that anyone who presumed that the rest of the world was as intellectually limited as themselves was merely mistaken. I was wrong: if they have any power at all, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy as they kick anyone with ability out. The new twitter is a dreary testament to the deceased neurons of the new management. Color me unemployable for saying so.

jphackworth• 15 years ago

This emphasis on "culture" is fatuous horse excrement. Whenever you hear that word, reach for your resume.

The new twitter is a dreary testament to the deceased neurons of the new management.

This sort of comment doesn't belong on Hacker News. There's nothing here besides insulting Twitter in a way that uses interesting words.

roel_v• 15 years ago

Sorry for OT, but 'mansplainer' is my new favorite insult, thanks.

goodweeds7• 15 years ago

One of twitter's engineers has been accused of attempting to rape a female speaker at ApacheConf. That's the reason two friends of mine have quit Twitter last year. Their culture is incredibly broken.

harlanlewis2• 15 years ago

This is a very serious accusation that implies a lot about how the company handled it, and after a handful of searches I've found no other references to it.

noste• 15 years ago

I assume goodweeds refers to this http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Noirin_Shirley_ApacheCon_... . That page classifies the incident as sexual assault instead of attempted rape, but I have to admit that I don't know the precise distinction between the two.

earl• 15 years ago

That would be Noirin Plunkett. Her account [1] and the discussion that went about the same way all posts on HN that touch on sexual assault or misogyny do... [2].

[1] http://blog.nerdchic.net/archives/418/

[2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1875718

sk5t• 15 years ago

Source? And why should we presume the accused guilty? Does Twitter company policy suborn rape?

goodweeds7• 15 years ago

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/11/08/google-blogger-noir...

There was no handling of it. The typical rapist response was "she was drunk, she asked for it". Then it was swept under the rug.

goodweeds7• 15 years ago

Fun orthogonal fact. I only first heard about the ApacheCon incident this summer after a guy on that huffingtonpost thread started stalking a friend and co-worker of mine at a conference. It blew my mind to see him there so strongly defending the jerk at Twitter. I did some research (asking his co-workers) and discovered this was a known problem with him embarrassing them at several conferences, but his boss wouldn't fire him because he had a wife and a new baby. I bitched about the guy on facebook and found out two friends who had just quit Twitter said, "that guy was the final straw, we were just waiting for our vesting to finish". Sadly, they put more priority on their greed than their own moral compass.

Moral of the story: Women at conferences are there to work, not to get hit on by some pimply-faced nerd with no game. Especially married ones with rings who say "NO".

peteretep3• 15 years ago

Can you explain how you get from an alleged action of an individual to "their culture is incredibly broken"?

goodweeds7• 15 years ago

By not firing him on the spot they sent a message to their employees that this is acceptable behavior and have created a hostile, fearful work environment for their female employees. They have also allowed Florian to attend other conferences and represent Twitter, which discourages other women from wanting to attend these conferences, and from wanting to interact with brogrammers from Twitter. Their lack of action is wrong in so many ways that if you don't understand it, I feel really sorry for you, because you were clearly raised without a father, or at least without a father who knew how to teach you to be a man.

And for some reason, it's always germans. A german from VW violently raped one of my father's engineers at a conference 20 years ago, and VW tried pretty hard to cover it up. Since dad is now dead, I don't feel sorry to say that he beat this man to within an inch of his life, and then had him arrested.

airlocksoftware• 15 years ago

I really don't know what Twitter's next move is. They've done a great job of building a successful platform. But the product is very simple (by design), and it seems they've largely exhausted the obvious extensions to it. How are they going to stay relevant for the next 5-10 years?

What's really behind Twitter's staff exodus

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